


Wise Men

by quigonejinn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, F/M, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-06-03 19:56:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6624112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When you were fifteen, you and Steve had been friends for years.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wise Men

**Author's Note:**

> A while back, I wrote fic about [a miserable D/s-ish universe about Steve Rogers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/466063). This is the Bucky Barnes POV version of that. You should also know the following things: 
> 
> 1\. This contains the soppiest "Bucky Barnes is in love with skinny Steve Rogers" bits that I am ever going to write.  
> 2\. This fic has a _lot_ of stuff about rape, rape culture, rape-related trauma, people dealing poorly with rape-related trauma, lots of internalization of gross systems of belief, and other shitty things. Specifically, there is an ugly mix of PTSD, social expectations, poor coping mechanisms, cultural shaming, and kink.  
>  3\. This fic contains thoughts of self-harm.  
> 4\. You know how "Captain America: The First Avenger" ends for Bucky, right?  
> 5\. Oh my god, the classifications of D and s still make no fucking sense. 
> 
> If you have triggers of any kind whatsoever, this is almost certainly not the fic for you.

**Part I.**

You are on your back, strapped to the table, and Zola comes through. He moves quickly, opening drawers and slamming them shut again. He leaves certain papers; he puts other ones into his briefcase. There are explosions. There is shouting. The technicians who had been -- readying you, so to speak, ran away, and you can hear how frightened Zola is.

Light comes in from windows set high in the wall, shining a light on this piece of equipment or the other, and Zola gets his hat. He has his coat over his arm and his briefcase clutched in both hands. He has to pass through the room with you before he can leave.

You call out. "Where are you going?"

He stares at you.

You test the restraints. It startles him, reminds him that he is frightened, so he staggers backward, out of reach, and then he runs away.

A few minutes later, your best friend comes into the room and rescues you.

*

How long have you known Steve Rogers? A long time. When you were eight or so, Steve and his mother moved into the apartment across from yours. You met his mother first: you came home one day from playing, and your mother had a guest in the kitchen. A woman. Neatly dressed, blonde, remarkably pretty, and she had a cup of tea in her hands. No collar, no marks, hair pulled up and over her ears.

She smiled and said that she had a son about your age, but he was sick right now, or she'd introduce the two of you.

It passed out of your mind: you were eight years old, and her son was apparently sick a lot, because you didn't really see him in school, not that you really went all that much, but you also didn't really see him running around the neighborhood. They were also quiet neighbors, so you barely even remembered they were there until one afternoon in spring when you were nine. You were sitting in the stairway, looking at your feet, and Mrs. Rogers came up with a bag of groceries on her hip.

She looked at you, and you sort of stared back at her in a flat, hostile way that usually made people move on. She started to move on, but then she came up onto the step past you, and saw your back.

"Come on," she said. "Steve is at school."

Your shirt was stuck to your back: you put it on afterwards, and you must have bled through it. Something about the tone of her voice made you turn and really look at her: not what you expected in any way. If you'd seen pity in her eyes or heard it in her voice, you would have told her to go to hell, knocked the groceries out of her hands and down the stairs. If there had been anger on your behalf, you would have told her to mind her own goddamn business. 

None of that. Just calm. If you'd known the word then, you would have used the word _assessing_.

She surprised you.

Some years later, her son gets you up off a table.

"I thought you were shorter," you say.

*

How did it go that afternoon? This happens in most universes: you were eight, and your father beat you bloody with first his fists, then with his belt. Mrs. Rogers surprised you by not offering pity or sympathy or anything but a cool, calm assessment that you needed someone to get the shirt off you before the scabs formed against your shirt -- she was a nurse. You remember hearing your mother and her talking about that before you went outside to play, but why had you even put the shirt on?

She doesn't say another word after you get up off the step, and you follow her up the stairs to the floor where both of the apartments were. She unlocked her apartment door, and you feel, very keenly, the strangeness of turning away from the apartment where you lived, so you listen for the sounds of your father inside the apartment: could you snoring? Can you hear the radio? Dead? Alive? You didn't think he had gone out.

"We need to get your shirt off," Mrs. Rogers says, putting her groceries down on the counter.

Her voice is quiet, but clear. She reaches behind her neck and unfastens the collar, sets it down next to the carrots and the potatoes. She washes her hands thoroughly with a block of soap from by the sink, and you look to the left, the right, taking in the apartment: the apartment is clean. The floors are scrubbed and the walls are bare. Poorer than your family, you think, even though she is a nurse.

"It's going to hurt," she says, more gently than you expect. "Pull a chair out. Sit down."

Working slowly, stopping in the middle even your head is stuck in the undershirt and your arms are sticking straight out because it hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much that you think you're going to embarrass yourself by crying, and then you sob when she needs you to raise your arms over your head, and there are tears running your cheeks when she lifts up and over. You expect her to make a noise when she sees bad your back was, and you see her think about saying something, but maybe she sees your face, too.

*

She checks your hands and your arms and legs for broken bones, makes sure you can see out of both eyes, then gets the hydrogen peroxide. She says the next time it gets this bad, come across the hallway, but you don't believe her. In all the years that come afterwards, you never do, because you have your pride to consider, but you remember the light catching on her hair, the light catching on her face while she tried to soak the blood stains out of your shirt. She might have been doing laundry in the sink, but she was every inch --

Three weeks later, you still have scabs falling off, but you're healing. You've had worse; you'll have worse again, and you and a bunch of other kids are just having some fun, but this skinny little kid comes up and starts talking loudly about leaving the old man alone, he isn't hurting anyone.

It's mid-afternoon. The kid's nose is bloody; somebody went to the effort to dress him up nice for school, and now, he has blood smeared over the front of his shirt. 

Somebody asks him his name.

"Steve Rogers," he says, and somebody hits him, so he doubles up over in pain, but when he looks up, clutching his stomach, there is something familiar about the way he looks back at the bunch of you, the way it shows in his eyes and face and voice.

"Aw, fuck," you say and turn on your heel and start hitting anyone and everyone who won't leave him alone.

*

"Your mother," you've said to Steve, "was the classiest dame, top or bottom, who ever drew breath."

"Don't talk about my mother like that," he'd reply, looking a little pained.

*

Before you came out of the HYDRA camp, you never worried about _the fairness problem_ for submissives. Why would you? You aren't one, and furthermore, when you do think about it, nothing strikes you as all that wrong about the way that America treats them. They can get jobs. They can vote. They have rights.

Do you think about it afterwards?

*

Zola comes out. He has his coat over his arm and his hat on his head. You call out. "Where are you going?"

He stares at you.

You never --

*

"They offered me the chance to go home. I think they want to send me home."

"Do you want to go?"

You're in the infirmary tent, on your back again, but not tied down: you can move your wrists, move your feet, and Steve is sitting in a chair by your bed. There is a light bulb hanging over your head; it's loud. It's crowded. You can hear voices; you can hear the clanking of trucks passing outside, and feet of units out on PT, running past. You look down at your hands and realize that they've closed into fists; Steve sees them too, so he picks his words carefully.

"You look fit to fight."

"I walked thirty-five miles."

"You did."

"I walked on a thirty-foot beam over a factory on fire."

"I saw you."

Steve is looking in the eye, steady, calm. "So you want to stay?"

You look over. "Wouldn't you?"

*

Before you come out of the HYDRA camp, you never worried about _the identification quandary_. Most of the time, all it took was looking, right? You looked at a person, paid a little attention to the way they moved and reacted to things, and it was clear. Even when it wasn't just a matter of using your eyes and common sense, dominance and submission were deep, fundamental characteristics. They ran through all aspects of the person, mental and physical. Boys knew they were boys; girls knew they were girls. Tops know they were tops, and bottoms knew it: there were physical differences, blood differences, scientific differences. There were articles in magazines, and your girlfriends used to read them to you. 

_Ten best foods to feed your top._ _How to know if a submissive wants_ it. 

"It?" you would say to them, smiling. 

And they giggled back at you. 

You don't know the details of how Steve got into the Army, let alone turned into a shining, six foot two example of the model American dominant, but you're glad it's enough to get --

*

What do you remember about the HYDRA camp? More than you want to. More than you care to. On the walk between the HYDRA camp and the Allied base, you asked Steve what year it was, and he looked at you for a moment before answering. "1944," he said. "It's still March, Bucky."

It only took them two weeks to --

*

Steve gets you into the Howling Commandos, and when the infirmary discharges you, you go to the commissary, get issued a brand new kit, and take it over to the barracks that the Howling Commandos have been assigned. Last to show, last to choose, so you have the bunk by the door and stow your stuff and then lie back on the bed with your hands tucked behind your head. You've been in the Army; you know what it's like. You expect trouble, you're braced for it, you're ready to push back as hard as you need to, but it doesn't materialize.

You get left alone until it's time to dinner, and then, everybody leaves you alone at mess. You eat at the end of the table, not looking at anybody or anything; the kid from Fresno is across from you, and the fact that he sounds completely American notwithstanding, he's left out until he makes some smart-ass comment about Falsworth's mustache, and everybody laughs.

In between bites, you look around the table, and you recognize a man here, a man there. You saw one guy on the troop transport over to England. You're pretty sure that you saw Falsworth the afternoon before the shitwipes in Command sent _infantry_ with minimal mechanized support out against mechanized tanks that shot lightning bolts.

Unsurprisingly, you're on dish duty even though it's your first day out of the infirmary, and you end up in soapy water up to your elbows for a full two, two and a half hours afterwards. Someone cops a feel when dish crew is turning its aprons in at the end of the night, but you ignore it, and when you get back to barracks, you check your stuff, make sure that nobody's taken anything out or put anything in. Nobody has. You lie back on your bunk and stare at the mattress overhead until the lights get turned off. You strip off your uniform shirt; you take your shoes off, but you keep your undershirt, your pants. You stay dressed in your bunk even after the lights are off. You stay awake most of the night, listening to the snoring, listening to the snoring and breathing and shifting. Every time somebody walks by you on their way out to the john, you tense.

You try to breathe deep.

You try not to think about anything.

*

On dish duty, the guy next to you tries to strike up a conversation about Steve. _Is it true what I heard_ and _hey, I heard you're a friend of his from before_ and _what is he like_.

You ignore him, and eventually, he stops trying.

*

Two days later, before breakfast, Dugan comes up to your bunk. He isn't wearing a shirt, not even an undershirt, and he's holding his dress button-up in his hands. He says that he lost a button off his shirt, so would you mind -- you don't even let him finish the sentence. You just deck him. You slip out of the bed, move as if you're going to take the shirt from his hands, but then just haul back and clock him him. He doesn't go down easy, but you figured he wouldn't, since he's a big guy and not just some son-of-a-bitch in an alley. Part of your mind notes that the rest of the squad comes gathering around and yelling in excitement, but it's still you and Dugan facing off. It isn't four assholes holding you down while Dugan unzips his pants. It isn't somebody pinning your arms behind you while somebody gets your trousers down.

There is some part of your mind that realizes this, writes it down somewhere, but in the meantime, Dugan swings, and you step back out of reach.

He is taller than you, so he has better reach, but he is right-handed and doesn't really move that fast, so you step to his left and hit him from there. He manages to clip you in the mouth before you can get out of the way, but while his fist is against your lip, you loop your foot around his right ankle, shift your weight. He's already off balance from putting his body weight behind punching you, so the two of you tumble to the floor. His height isn't much of a fucking advantage now, is it?

Dugan is still a little confused. He isn't sure how he ended up on the floor, and when he rolls onto his back away from you, it's the easiest thing in the world for you to --

You get yanked backwards, off Dugan. You expect that you're about to swarmed, and you're about to drive a braced elbow into whoever is trying to hold you when you realize it's Steve. His hand is still on the back of your neck, fingers curled under the collar of your undershirt and thumb along your neck. You look up the arm, follow the arm to the shoulder, then the shoulder to the neck, to the face that looks only enough like Steve's to be strange.

Slowly, when he's sure you aren't going to swing for Dugan, he takes his hands off you. You swear you can feel where his thumb was against your neck, still warm, but you stand next to him: it's the first time he's had to hand out discipline to the Howling Commandos, and Dugan is staring at you, hand pressed over his jaw where you hit him. You wipe blood from the corner of your mouth and look him in the eye, seeing if he's going to try to swing for you while Steve is there. Somebody picks his shirt up off the floor and hands it to him.

You won't bow your head while Steve hands out four weeks without leave to everyone in goddamn sight except for you, but you do follow at Steve's heels back to his room.

*

You know, to some degree, that they'd been leaving you alone out of _respect_ for Steve Rogers.

*

You know, with clarity, ever since you woke up one morning in the infirmary and found Steve in uniform and drowsing on the empty cot next to yours, hand stretched out towards you even in sleep -- you know what everyone assumes you do for Steve Rogers. Most people think you were a sub who managed to sneak through training or, alternatively, a top who gives it up for Steve Rogers, which just means you're a slightly pickier bitch than normal. They don't know what he was like before, all five foot four or five, a hundred ten pounds soaking wet.

Those who knew him from before -- 

*

In the neighborhood like the one that you and Steve grew up in, what do distinctions like _dominant_ and _submissive_ mean? 

People worked when they could. People yelled. People drank. A girlfriend once showed you an article in her submissive's magazine about how she should kneel in front of you, how she should pitch her voice low and sweet and address you as _sir_ or _master_ , whatever you liked better, and you'd laughed and pulled her into your lap and tried to pin her wrists behind her back and unbutton her blouse at the same time, but lacked the appropriate number of hands to do so, so she just giggled and kissed you and let you roll her onto the bed and unbuttoned her blouse for you. Then, the girl she was splitting an apartment with had banged on the wall because the two of you were being _loud_. 

That was the kind of thing you liked.

That was what you went for. Girls. Always very pretty. Always capable of giving almost, almost as good as they got. Who were happy when then it turned out they preferred, as a matter of their own pleasure, not to. 

Steve eats most of his meals with the Commandos, but as a captain, he has a separate little office and sleeping quarters -- same squat building at the SSR base near London, but separated by cinderblock walls. There is a separate entrance, and when you follow him in, Steve shuts the door hard enough to make the frame rattle.

*

People who weren't at the camp assume that you're either a sub or that you're willing to give it up for Steve. Look at him, after all. Six foot plus, that blonde hair, that way of standing. How could he have ever been something else? 

People who were there -- 

*.

"What happened?"

"You can't guess?"

"If he was trying -- "

You cross your arms. "You think he'd still have teeth in his head if he tried that?"

You see Steve relax -- not entirely, but visibly. He breathes out. Some of the strain goes from the corners of his eyes. Why should it surprise you to know that Steve needs to believe he picked good men? You know that once he came back from camp, they wanted him to lead a squad selected for him. He wouldn't go out to meet them: he flatly refused. You weren't there, but you heard on dish duty, and you think about reminding Steve of all the ways it could have gone -- well, worse. 

"It's the other part. Whether I'm just around to fetch and carry," you say, arms crossed over your chest and shoulders back.

Steve is taller than you are now, of course. You'd say about half a head, but it's more in the shoulders, heavy with muscle. How much more does he weigh than you? His hair catches in the light, and it's more blond than you remember. You consider, too, the ways in which his face looks like the one you remember; you consider the ways that it's different. It surprises you, actually, that the mouth looks softer. You remember noticing it on a USO tour poster in Manchester, back when --

"There's one easy way out of it," you say and move closer towards him. There is a long, electric moment. 

Steve's eyes are on you. 

You take a half-breath; you're close enough that he could reach one hand out and pull you to him or push you down on your knees. You can almost feel his thumb against the back of your neck, if you wanted to. What you want to do is open your mouth, bend your knees, tilt your head up so that you're looking down through your lashes at him and -- for a long moment, Steve almost looks disappointed in you. 

In the end, you pull your sleeves up. The most you can talk him into doing is putting his hands on your wrists and squeezing hard enough to leave bruises.

That night, after dish duty, you come back. Steve is already in bed, so you strip in the dark, fold your clothes up by feel and lay them on top of your shoes.

"You want a blanket?" he says while you're laying yourself, gingerly, down on the floor. It's cool against your bare skin. Concrete. It's a small room, and you don't have a lot of space. The lights are still off, but the moonlight makes a patch of light on the wall.

"It won't look right if I have one."

You consider telling him it isn't the worst floor you've slept on, but it wouldn't help either of you, so you curl up at the foot of his cot. When Morita comes to wake him up, while Steve is sitting up and rubbing his face and giving a few quick orders before getting out of bed to dress. After Morita had knocked and Steve said _come in_ , you'd moved quickly to kneel by the side of the bed, head down, not looking anyone in the face, let alone the eye. The room is bright enough to see in because it's about half an hour after dawn; you put wrists on your thighs, a couple inches above the knees, and turn your wrists up, so that the marks from Steve's hands are visible.

Morita looks at you once, then closes the door behind him.

"You need me to give you the -- "

"No," you say and get onto your feet without waiting for permission. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Steve breathe out, relieved.

*

Does he have a problem with telling Morita what to do with the brass that has shown up two hours ahead of schedule? Does he have a problem with telling Colonel Phillips and senior Army staff members exactly what he thinks during strategical meetings? Absolutely not.

Does he have a problem with telling you to get up off your knees? Yes.

*

Do you feel any different, on a day-to-day basis, than before you went on the table? No.

Have you always been able to put a bullet through the temple of a HYDRA scout at 800 yards? No.

*

You walk back into barracks at the end of day, and the place goes quiet: Jones and Morita and Dernier are playing cards on an overturned crate, and Dugan looks up. He gets up out of his bunk and walks over to you. You shift onto the front of your feet, but he holds his hands up, palms facing you. "I'm sorry," he says, and it sounds like he means it. You consider his face, study the eyes and the angle of the mouth. You hold your hand out; your hands are wrinkled from having been up to your elbows in soapy water, but Dugan visibly relaxes and shakes your hand. Smiles, then winces because his lip is still split from your fist.

You sleep fully dressed in your bunk, pocket knife folded in your right hand.

In the morning, you're out in a field in a sniper's crouch. Fog hangs in the grass; the world smells wet and new, and Phillips and Carter and Steve and Stark standing behind you, and they watch you calmly, methodically put hole after hole through a target set up roughly half a mile away. Phillips has to use binoculars to even see the targets, and when the red flag goes up once, twice, three times to indicate that you put all three bullets in the red circle at the heart of the bull's-eyes. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Steve put his hands in his pockets and laugh.

"You going to tell me not to take him, Colonel?" Steve says, surprised, happy. Still laughing.

*

Do you feel any different?

You feel comfortable in your body. It's still the same body. These are, when you look down at them, the same hands as you had. These are your arms, your legs, your mouth. You just happen to have a memory of being on your knees on the concrete. You have a half-memory of doing something stupid, and you remember your hands being cuffed behind you. It was late in the day, and you were hit in the face and the stomach until you lost the contents of your stomach on the floor. This was on the main floor, so the noise rising from the other prisoners was incredible.

Someone gripped your hair and pushed you face-down, and after a while, they let you back up. Someone was pulling your trousers off -- they'd confiscated belts early on, first thing, and you started kicking.

You would like to believe your memory goes black after that. 

*

What does Steve want from you? Skill with a rifle.

What does Steve need from you? Friendship.

What do you want? To stay alive.

What do you need? 

*

"They want to send me home," you say to Steve.

"Do you want to go?"

The two of you are in the infirmary tent, and Steve is sitting in a chair by your bed. A day and a half later, you still aren't used to Steve's new face: it looks just enough like his old one for it to be disorienting.

Steve picks his words carefully.

"You look fit to fight," he says.

"I walked thirty-five miles."

"You did."

"I walked on a thirty-foot beam over a factory on fire."

"I saw you."

You look down at your hands. They look like your hands. They're attached to wrists that look like your wrists, but you walked thirty-five miles all through the night and most of a day. You walked forty feet on a narrow beam over a raging fire when you couldn't stand fifteen minutes before. Steve didn't find you with the others that had been singled out for interrogation: you were in a different part of the complex.

*

The first trip out with the Howling Commandos, Steve intends to use you mostly in a sniper capacity. You have demonstrated capacity with the rifle, and Dernier comes back with the scouting report. Steve pulls out the topographical map to refresh his memory, and you come and stand by his right-hand shoulder.

Your hands may be attached to your wrists attached to your arms and your shoulders, but --

*

You imagine that Steve has, in his reports, the copy of the statement you gave about what happened to you. You imagine that Steve has, in his reports, copies of the statements of others who saw what you did. 

*

These are your hands, but they are rock-steady. These are your eyes, but you can see farther, more clearly, and in lower light than anyone else in the unit, even Steve. You can slow your heart with a thought; after weeks of abuse and mistreatment and deprivation, you walk thirty-five miles next to Steve. You walk forty feet across a narrow beam when, fifteen minutes before, you hadn't been able to stand on your own feet.

You're a city boy from Brooklyn who had mediocre marks in firearms during basic training. Who taught you to shoot? Who taught you how to move through woodland, how to slip through underbrush without sound? The first trip out with the Howling Commandos, Steve puts you on a hilltop and intends to use you mostly in a sniper capacity. That is exactly what you do: with Morita next to you acting as spotter, your primary objective is taking out the guards in the north towers, so that Steve can bring the rest of the Commandos around the east approach. Your secondary goal is slowing HYDRA reinforcements for long enough for Dugan's explosives to go.

Morita has binoculars; he lets you know when the Commandos are in position, and he calls the guards for you. You shoot the guards. You shoot their commanding officer who comes out of the comfortable guard hut to inquire after them. You shoot the lieutenant inside the guard hut the moment he picks up the intercom to relay information to command that they're under attack: the building has two floors around a central courtyard with guard towers along the north and east approaches, and it's just the daylight side of dawn. There are moving shapes on the second floor. Officer's canteen, you'd guess, from the location and the shapes you're seeing. You know a little about those places.

There is a long, long moment, and Morita says, quietly, _reinforcements, eleven o' clock, hundred and fifty yards from Cap, closing_.

*

You remember the first time that you bailed Steve out of a fight, and you remember the first time you bailed him out of a fight, and it mattered that he wasn't just small, but also neatly built with long hands, a pretty throat, and a prettier mouth. 

*

You think you know how Steve kept you from being sent home.

Everyone thinks they know why Steve kept you from being sent home. 

*

Steve knows what everyone believes you do for him: three weeks in, the two of you are in the north of Italy again, beautiful day, clear countryside, ten miles behind their own lines resting for deployment that night in the middle of the better part of a division, and you and Steve go off a thousand yards into the woods. The two of you find little clearing, and Steve draws in his book. You sit on a rock, light a cigarette and take deep, deep breaths, let your heart beat at whatever speed it wants, which is, apparently, slow and lazy.

Neither of you says a thing for a long, long time.

"We should get back for dinner," Steve says, turning a little and looking over through the trees. You sit up, slow, still a little lazy, and the book is still on Steve's knees. The pencil is still in his hand, and you make a point of yawning and not moving. He laughs.

"Come on, kid," he says, standing, and slowly, reluctantly, you stub your cigarette out, then muss your hair.

"Hold on," you say, and rub dirt into the knees of your trousers. Smear a little on your cheek. Bite your lips to make them look good and red.

"You should breathe a little hard," you tells Steve, and Steve lifts his eyebrows.

"Listen, I'm a good lay," you say.

Steve laughs all the way back. 

*

When you were eight, your dad came home for a while, and you spent one particular afternoon of that _while_ at Mrs. Rogers's place. She peeled the shirt off your back, did what she could, then carefully cut an apple and sandwich in two. Made herself coffee, poured you out a glass of milk, and the two of you ate mostly in silence. The windows were open, so sounds from the street drifted up, and you remember the utter, startling stillness of it. You were familiar in a bone-deep way with a tense break in a fight between adults, or the slow, disappointing almost-quiet of coming out into the living room and finding one or both of your parents half-dressed and still drunk and snoring, but this was -- different.

You ate your half. She ate hers. She had her coffee. You had your milk.

Later, when you were older, you realized that Mrs. Rogers took what she was going to eat for lunch, and cut it in half and shared it with you: even in those days, that was how tight money was.

You remember the way --

*

You remember the way she had looked that afternoon, sitting in the sunlight, drinking her coffee You remember the light in her hair, the light across her cheekbones, the way she tilted her head to listen when something noisy happened out on the street. She wore a collar in public, but not in private, and almost twenty years later, even after the table, you can call up what she looked like.

When you were fifteen, you and Steve had been friends for years. One night, you and him and his Ma went out to the movies to celebrate a promotion for her. More hours at the hospital, better shift. More money. After the feature, while you and Steve stood out on the sidewalk, she went back inside because she thought she had left a glove in there. She hadn't been wearing her collar because she was out with both you and Steve, and when she didn't come out after five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes, eighteen, the two of you went back in, running, and found her pinned up against a wall, terrified out of her mind because the goddamn manager was trying to fuck her as the price for letting her back in to look for her glove.

You can't remember what you said. You can't remember what you did.

You remember your anger.

*

You remember that at the camp, you protested at them running out of food before getting to the cell that had your work unit. They took you away, not only from the rest of your work unit, but from the floor entirely: you remember the way that the two guards looked at each other, and half an hour later, they came back with an officer who looked you over, then gave the order to cuff you. They brought you to a room with a concrete floor and no windows. How many were there? Four? Five? All officers. One woman. 

They hit you until you went on your knees, and they hit you again, face and torso and hold your face down on the floor against blood from your mouth and nose. You screamed something in English about how this made them brave, didn't it? Hitting a man with his hands behind his back, and one of them casually kicked you in the side of the head. The world went unsteady; you fell over, and when you struggled back up to your knees, you took one look at the circle of boots and legs, and -- you remember, though, you remember the strange, peculiar quality of this fear. The world pulsed and swam. Blood was coming from your mouth and nose, though a little slower now that they'd stopped hitting you for a same moment, but the memory that rises from that moment is fear, rather the taste of blood: you had been afraid before. You had been helpless before. You grew up poor in a poor part of Brooklyn. The times you ended up on the steps with a bloody back were only part of it what your father did: coming under enemy fire by lightning-powered tanks was not the first time you thought you might be dying in the very near, near future.

You remember the prickle down your back; you remember the look on the face of one of the officers. He was interested. He had a smile in the corner of his mouth. 

This, you remember, was the first time you were afraid of being raped. The thought had never occurred to you before. 

*

You remember being on your knees. You remember the fear. 

Out in the field with Steve, you wake from a dream of it in the middle of the night, and you take a moment to reorient yourself. There are stars above, and the air smells, ever so slightly, like smoke. There are low voices; there are men getting up out of their bedrolls. The first patrol coming in woke you; you drew the third patrol, the one right before dawn, and you stay awake while watching Steve get out of his sleeping bag for the second patrol. Pull on his helmet, find his shield in the half-light of the moon. He doesn't have to look very far for it: he keeps it close, like he misses it when it isn't there.

He sees that you're awake. The two of you look at each other for a momen. 

Wordlessly, you roll back over into your sleeping bag.

**Part II.**

In the north of France, a small town outside of Brussels, the allegedly-neutral Spanish countryside: what is your kill count at this point? The Commandos go back the SSR base in England, and you eat at the table with the Howling Commandos. Steve tries to grab at least one full meal with his men every day, and whether he is there or not, they save a seat for him, and you have the seat next to that, and nobody makes you clean up after them.

One time at lunch, with Jones at one shoulder of yours and the captain's empty chair at your other side, you notice a man looking at you from the other side of the room. A friend pointed you out to him: you assume that somebody is pointing you out as the only submissive in the whole of the Allied Forces or something along those lines, and Dugan is telling a story that has everybody focused on him, so you quite deliberately, quite carefully make eye contact with the man.

He blinks. You smile, just a little, and then duck your head, as though you've suddenly become shy.

You remember the fear you had felt on your knees, in that concrete room, with no windows. 

*

After dinner, you're walking back from Stark's testing grounds, and you round a corner and run into the man from the canteen: he had been staring off in the distance, and you deliberately made eye contact and smiled at him and then lowered your head. Now that you're closer to him, you see that he wears a sergeant's marks; like the rest of the Howling Commandos, you don't wear a uniform anymore, though every single last one of you has the white-winged symbol somewhere visible. You and Falsworth both have it the shoulder of your jackets. Morita wears it painted on his radio equipment.

You look at the man. The man looks at you, tries to smile, and you start to push past him, but he puts his hand on your arm: not hard, not in any way threatening. Lightly, in fact, just below where the white Commando wing is on your shoulder, and he tries to talk to you. He's from Albany. Where are you from? Did you see the movie they put up on a sheet and showed last Wednesday?

He isn't bad-looking, as things go. Brown-eyed, brown-haired, about your height. Nice smile.

"Bring your friend," you say, after a long moment of silence, where he can't look away from your face. "I'll do you both in the field next to the Garage 4."

*  
You remember -- 

*

You beat the shit out of him and his friend.

The friend is undoing his belt already, but the guy you met looks like he wants to ask you out on a dinner date, so you just hit him in the fucking face, then pivot and swing your braced elbow into the jaw of the friend. Deliberately, you don't let yourself think of -- other things. Other people. Do you want to get court martialed for murder? So you keep yourself from thinking of Zola or the guards or HYDRA. Still, when the MP's come, they have to drag you off the men. In fact, you take a swing for one of M's, and another one of thems you in the side of a head with a truncheon. 

You go down on your knees. Your knuckles are bloody; you're out of breath. You try to get up off your knees, and strong hands shove you back down on to them. They are cursing and about to drag you off to the brig for the general in the morning when somebody notices the wing on your shoulder. 

Somebody says the magic words.

_Captain America._

*

Some of the arguments against submissives serving in active duty have to do with discipline: will collared submissives take discipline from anybody but their top? Will dominants want anyone but themselves to discipline their submissives? 

Steve had arguments about how all of these were horseshit, but you don't remember what they were. You never paid attention.

*

You remember one night heading home with Steve from Greenpoint by trolley.

A warm night in early summer; the windows were open, and your shirt sleeves were rolled up. You were fairly drunk and sitting. Steve was less drunk and standing. He wasn't tall enough to reach the straps above for people standing when the trolley was crowded, but the trolley car was empty except for you and Steve and the driver all the way up front. Steve could have had rows and rows of seats to himself. There was no reason in the world for Steve to stand next to you except wanting to be near you, and you remember: how nice it felt to be pleasantly drunk with your best friend with the whole weekend to look forward to, how nice to feel of the air against your skin, how nice it was to be headed home, and also, not least, how nice it was to watch at Steve.

He had unbutttoned the collar of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves; the light inside the trolley was a little dim, and the streets outside were dark, but you could make out the line of his throat, the lines of his wrist, the way he turned his head when the trolley stopped at a light and he wanted to see what street the trolley had gotten to. The light played on his face and showed the shape of his mouth and how -- you didn't have words. Steve Rogers was the artist out of the two of you. He managed a year of art classes after graduating from high school; it was a year more of education than you ever scraped through. 

The trolley pulled away from the light. 

Steve turned and looked at you, and you remember: you remember the slow, lazy, half-drunk way he smiled at you. 

You remember that they beat you in that concrete room without windows, but they didn't rape you. 

*

Did you and Steve ever mess around? Yes, when both of you were young, and you had kissed a few girls and had liked it. Steve was curious, but not desperate the way you were, and he let you kiss him. You let him kiss you, but it felt wrong, and you leaned against his mouth. Steve breathed out, warm air against your wet lips, and you remember the way it went down your back like a live wire. Instinctively, you reached out and put two fingers around his right wrist. He jerked away and said, in his normal tone of voice, this wasn't going to work.

_This is a mistake. I don't --_

*

Steve Rogers didn't like to be touched at the wrist or the mouth or the throat. Steve Rogers was never going to roll onto his stomach for you. Steve Rogers was never going to be a submissive for you, and there you are, remembering the fact that they didn't rape you in the concrete room. They beat you, but nobody came close to fucking you. 

Some time later, you beat the shit out of a pair of men who thought they were going to get laid: the military police pull you off them, and they don't know what the fuck to do with you. Neither of the men managed to get a finger on you, but your head is ringing from the blow to the head from the police. 

Now, you're on your knees, hands cuffed behind you, a familiar dizziness settling behind your eyeballs. You look up. They break off in the middle of a conversation. 

"You should send me to him," you say. 

*

You remember a certain pattern of conversation that you had with Steve: he would be angry at something that he saw as an injustice or unfair. You would try drag him out of the subway car or the bar or restaurant or movie theater before he could say something that would get him in more trouble than he was in, and most of the time, it worked. Your arm over his shoulder, for example, physically pulling him away, and on the way home, you would point out this was the way it had always been. The two of you would fight about whether this was a reason, but what you remember was the way Steve's shoulder felt under your hand. 

You remember what it felt like, hauling him away from a fight. You remember the way he would try to pull his shoulder away from your hand; you remember gripping him by the elbow, hard, and turning him around to look at you. You remember the way his shoulder felt, impossibly small, bony, very much alive under your hand. 

To the eyes, it looked like a top yanking his bottom back, didn't it? 

The base police deliver you to Steve at the door, and you shut the door behind you. You ask Steve for his belt. 

*

"What happened?"

"What do you think happened?" 

"I went for a walk by myself. It didn't go well," you say. This is a lie, and you know it. Does Steve know it yet? Your hand is still out, palm up, waiting for Steve to put his belt in your hand. 

Steve doesn't move, either towards his belt or otherwise: he has private quarters,but it's just a room with cinder block around and a single window set high in the wall. There is barely enough room for a bed, a desk, and a chair. "What are you going to do with it?"

"What do you think I'm going to do with it?"

What choice does Steve have in this? What choice do you have in this? 

*

You realize he isn't going to give you his belt, so you start to undo yours.

*  
Base police deliver you to Steve's door, and you tell Steve how to choke you. It needs to be clear. It needs to be obvious. It needs to be hard punishment. The Commandos might be shipping out in two days, in five days, at any point, so he can't break a bone. The same for a generalized beating. The same for extended confinement in a small space. Steve does the calculation as quick as you, but it just takes a little more time for you to talk him into accepting it, but in the end, you convince him. 

Steve clears off his desk, and you bend over the edge. Steve stands behind you, wraps the belt around your throat. He holds it with his right hand; you grip his left. His elbow is wedged against your shoulder, and he chokes you until you aren't gripping his left hand anymore. Then, he lets go and he counts: are you coughing after he's counted to sixty? Are you not coughing until after he's counted to ten? 

Both of you know what the marks need to look like, but for amusement, you play a little as though Steve doesn't. Eventually, because Steve is six foot two and outweighs you now, your legs go out from under you. You lay in a corner, sucking in deep, deep lungfuls of air, trying to make yourself breathe and hold, so that you don't end up hyperventilating. 

Your eyes are watering. Even with your HYDRA-improved vision, you can't see what Steve's face looks like. 

*

Afterwards, you start to get up off your knees, but Steve tells you to stay down. His voice sounds different, strangely distant, and he tells you to strip. You do, folding your clothes up neatly, and Steve tells you that you're sleeping on concrete that night. You stay on your knees; you watch him undress himself. At what point does Steve figure out that you are, possibly, lying about having gone for a walk and gotten jumped? 

Steve undresses and puts all of his clothes away neatly, carefully, but the belt stays on the floor where he dropped it. You can take the hint: the next morning, when you wake in the gray light and find Steve watching you from bed, you've curled yourself around it. 

*

You fetch. You carry. For the first time in a long time, you wear an Army uniform. Steve checks it over before you step foot outside his door and tells you what to fix, as if you didn't go into the Army nine months before he did and spend six months more being an actual soldier he doesn't touch you when pointing out that the left lapel is a little curled under or that you need to tie the laces on your shoes again. At Steve's pre-breakfast morning briefing, where there is classified information, Steve leaves you outside the door on your knees, and when he comes out an hour later, talking to Howard Stark, you stay on your knees until Steve says, "Up." 

You feel Stark's eyes on you for a fraction of a second, recognizing you as the person that he builds sniper rifles for, but it's only a fraction of a second: Stark has manners, after all, so he goes back to talking to Steve. He puts his hands back in his pockets, fidgets with some change. They talk about how Morita will be stopping by Howard's lab later in the day to get Howard to look at his radio setup, and at breakfast, you kneel next to Steve's chair; the chair the Commandos save for you is directly in front of you, below eye-level, and Steve sees you looking at it. There is a moment when you think he is going to grab you by the hair and force your head back to look him in the eye. 

But he doesn't. 

Instead, he breaks off a piece of toast and puts it in his hand. You eat out of his hand. When he is done with his tray, he sets it on the ground for you. You look at the tray. Scrambled eggs. Canned beans. Coffee. All the way on the ground. How are you going to -- 

"You can use hands and utensils," Steve says, and you can hear the strain in his voice, but you don't look him in the face. 

* 

At the second meeting of the day, the first one where you went in with Steve, the Commandos were there, too, and you were getting ready to kneel by him, but he pulled a chair out for you. You sat down at the table, a little gingerly, a little carefully. Colonel Phillips stared down at the papers in his hands. 

Agent Carter -- 

*

It isn't that you came off the table angrier or any more inclined for a fight: you and Steve, to be honest, used to have that in common. You were both itching to punch the shit out of someone. Steve just had a problem landing punches. 

"How do you feel?" Steve asks.

"It's fine," you say and touch your throat, gingerly. Your voice is hoarse, partially from strain yesterday, partially from these being the first words you've said all day. "Looks worse than it feels."

Steve looks down at you. "You can get up off the floor."

It's late afternoon. You get up, sit down in a chair, and close your eyes: Steve is, you know, looking at your throat. He is sitting on the bed; the room is small enough that, he could still lean over and touch your throat. You hear the bed creak, and for a moment, you think he is going to do exactly that. 

He doesn't. 

Eventually, he stands and leaves, and you hear him slam the door. You don't move; you stay in the chair. 

*

When Steve was twenty, his mother had been dead for two years, and he had a decent job working in the art department of a newspaper, doing artwork for articles, plus the occasional illustration for advertisers too small to have their own art departments. Children in fall fashions, new appliances for the modern household, a dominant in business clothes coming home to a clean kitchen and a smiling submissive in apron and matching wrist cuffs, the new modern alternative to old-fashioned --

"Look up," you said to Steve. 

It was the end of the day: the whole place was empty, but Steve was staying late to work on something on deadline, and you were trying to nag him into leaving in time for the two of you to grab dinner together. Everybody else was gone. Why should he stay? And you hadn't seen much of him the weekend before; a girlfriend of yours had a mother away visiting a sick sister, so you'd spent the weekend with her; you hadn't even gone home for three nights, had after that, all week, come home after Steve was already asleep in the Murphy bed when you slipped in, shoes in hand, and found your way over to the couch in the dark. 

It's dark in the office now, or at least the art department: rows of desks, all dark. Even the lights overhead are off. Steve has the one next to his desk on, and it makes a yellow light that throws the right side of his face into shadows. . 

"Let's go eat," you say. "Come on." 

Steve goes on working.

"Come on," you say, finally. "What happened?" 

There is a long, long moment of silence, and slowly, Steve puts his pencil down. Slowly, Steve pushes his chair back from the desk. He looks up at you for a second, and then with an ugly look on his face, he brings his hands up to his throat to work his tie loose. When he turns his face towards the light, you see that his right eye is black, and you notice that two fingers of his left hand are stiff, swollen to double their usual size. When getting the shit kicked out of him, Steve tries to hang on and fight back as long as he can; your job is to try to arrive before he gets knocked down so many times he can't get back up, before he is on the ground with his right arm curled up up against his body to protect the hand he needs to earn a living. 

On the way out of the building to dinner, you have your arm over Steve's shoulders. He says goodnight to the security guard; the security guard smiles and waves goodbye to him, but has a dirty fucking look for you: what kind of top treats a nice kid like Steve that way? 

*

What did the officers in the room do to you? Beat you. Terrified you. Stripped off your clothes, drenched you in cold water, made you think that you were going to drown. Made you think that you were going to be raped. 

None of it compared to what Zola did to you. 

*

Here is an argument that you've had with Steve for decades: you would say this was how things had always worked. Steve was just going to have to get used to it. He would reply that was no reason for them to stay that way. That didn't make them _right_ or _fair_. He wasn't going to get used to it, because he shouldn't have to accept what wasn't _right_. You pointed out that people didn't have a problem with what he thought was right. They had a problem with his inability to keep his mouth shut about it. What did he expect would happen? 

In the end, here is what it boils down to: Steve Rogers hates, with clarity, every inch of every system that tells people that they should be judged for anything but the quality of their souls. 

You, on the other hand, are only aware of resenting the circumstances that have led to you sitting in the afternoon sun, gingerly testing the bruises on your throat, trying to gauge how much more you can take. Are you even capable of understanding what has been done to you? You certainly can't articulate it; you can't even identify the emotions you associate with what has happened. You hate what the guards did to you; you hate what Zola did to you. In turns, you dream about killing them and about being back on the table. Both of these things happen every night, over and over. Sometimes even in the same dream, and always in long, slow, bloody detail, but how can you put words on any of it except to think, to yourself, that things are _different_? 

Without turning your head, you listen to Steve leave the room. 

You hear the door shut behind him, and through the closed door, you hear him pause, unsure. He is wondering whether he should look the door and you hear him reach into his pocket. You hear the jingle of the keys coming out of his pocket, the key inserted into the door, then pulled back out again. 

You can almost hear Steve saying it: he wouldn't appreciate being locked into a room, whether for his own safety or -- otherwise. 

So he doesn't lock you in. In the end, he undoes the key from the ring and slides it under the door, so that you can come and go as you want, but you don't move from the chair. 

You stay there until the sun goes, until your back starts to ache, until you fall asleep. 

You wake back up again; the room is dark, and every bone in your body is stiff. 

*

Steve doesn't come back until after dinner. You realize, afterwards, that he spent the afternoon with Agent Carter and ate with her, too. 

He takes his jacket off; he hangs it up, along with his shirt and his pants and his tie and tie clip and all the other things he wears. He doesn't look you in the eye; he brushes his teeth in the sink in the corner, and he is stripped down to an underwear. Then, he gets to the closet and gets down a spare blanket and hangs it over the back of the chair. 

Without saying a word to you, he turns off the lights.

The key is still on the floor where he left it: he must have had a spare or gotten another one. Moving in the dark, you curl up on the floor at the foot of his bed, even though you know that sleep means dreams, and dreams mean reliving both killing Zola and the guards, and also being back on the table. What else can you do? You have no words to explain what has happened. You can only offer a description: you were Bucky Barnes, and you were a top. You had girlfriends, the occasional boyfriend; you worked some, had more fun, and wouldn't have minded turning Steve onto his stomach, but he didn't particularly want to let you, so you never pressed the issue. Instead, you settled for punching anybody you caught trying to lay a finger on him. By your lights, you were a good friend to an odd duck. You might even have been a little in love with him. 

Then, you went to war. HYDRA beat you and put fear in you. Zola put serum in your veins and worse in other parts of your body.

Now, what are you? 

You are conscious of lying on the floor; you are conscious that Steve isn't asleep yet. The floor is cool against your cheek and the palms of your hands, and Steve's breathing isn't slow enough for him to be asleep. The room is dark, but you can make out the head of the bed, the outline of Steve's writing desk and chair, and you can hear him catch his breath at something in his head, but he doesn't say a word to you, so you stay down at the foot of the bed. You do not pull the blanket off the back of the chair, and you don't ask Steve if you can get up into bed with him. One of your last thoughts before falling asleep with a bruised throat is wishing for a hand to touch your shoulders and comfort you. Your actual last thought is the realization, slowly, with some degree of surprise, that you are crying. 

There are tears on your cheeks; you are cold and stiff. You are curled on the floor at the foot of Steve's bed. 

What could you possibly be, Bucky Barnes, except a submissive? 

Also: Steve Rogers is in love with Peggy Carter.

 **Part III.**

You leave the group an hour before twilight, and you pick your way through six miles of forest. 

The needle on the compass is painted with something from Stark's laboratory that makes it glow in the dark, but all you need is the moon over your right shoulder and the river to your left. 

*

Needles -- 

When you stop, it's to have a drink of water and take a breath before spending five hours making your way through the next mile and a half, including a steep, eight hundred yard gravel slope in pre-dawn grayness within fifty feet of a HYDRA guard tower. They have a searchlight; they have machine guns. Luck is with you, though, and so is the deep, moonless night. So are the wind and the movement of the deep forest beyond: at the top, you pause for breath, then pull out wire clippers to cut a hole through the fence. You crawl on your stomach through the last quarter-mile of brush to the vantage point. 

The sky is just starting to get light at the edges, and under cover of brushes, you eat a little cold bread from your bag. You have a drink of water. 

You watch as the light goes on in the office when the first secretary arrives. She moves around the office, collecting the mail, starting the coffee, sorting the overnight courier. You watch the second secretary come in, a little late, breathless, putting her coat on the hanger and dropping her purse in the drawer underneath her dress. Pretty young girl with curly hair, a blue dress with lace at the collar. She apologizes to the first secretary, and through the magnifying scope, you watch her mouth form the words. It isn't the first time she's been late, you'd guess. The old woman doesn't seem inclined to forgive her, and the sky lightens and the birds start to sing. The man both of them work for arrives.

The pretty one takes his coat. The old one takes his briefcase and brings him coffee: when he sits down, she brings him papers and hovers over him until he looks up from them, smiles, and says something that makes her go away, a little downcast. The pretty secretary blinks, surprised, and you stay on your stomach, watching them through the scope and lip-reading their little Austrian office drama, until the meeting is assembled and the coffee poured and the commandant settled with his second and all the other attendees. 

You follow the promise you made yourself

You put the first bullet through the forehead of the head of scientific experimentation for the base. The second goes into the commandant's, and the third into the forehead of the pretty secretary with the lace collar around her throat. 

That night, you dream about --

*

One afternoon, you are in southern France, twenty-five miles or so beyond the front line, and Falsworth is next to you. It had been a mission of sabotage, with you in a sniper position and Falsworth as your spotter, providing cover for Cap and Dernier and Dugan while they destroyed a Hydra communications relay. A sympathetic village contact was supposed to let you into the church tower, the highest point in town, so that you would have a good vantage point: he was betrayed, you'd guess. 

_Louis sent me. He is my --_

Falsworth, you'll point out, touched his knife before you did. The man looked from Falsworth's face to his hand, then looked at your face, and opened his mouth to shout for help; it turned into a gurgle when Falsworth buried three inches of the blade in the man's throat. Neither of you wanted to risk a gunshot that would alert the HYDRA troops in the neighborhood, but the operation was blown. HYDRA agents came swarming through both doors, and you and Falsworth retreated into the churchyard with Falsworth firing a machine gun, so that you could pull from your pocket, somehow light a match, and touch it to the green signal flare for _abort mission_.

The HYDRA officer in charge turned his head up to watch it go into the sky, and since you couldn't brace yourself properly to use the sniper rifle, you pulled out your pistol and shot him.

That night, you dream about --

*

"We could surrender," Falsworth suggests. There are bullets whistling to the left and right of the crypt where the two of you are hiding. In front of the two of you is the southern French countryside, all rolling hills and blue sky. Behind the two of you is a church yard full of HYDRA agents.

"I'd shoot you, but we need the bullets," you reply, sounding more irritated than you intend to.

Falsworth is startled by the joke, but surprises both you and himself by actually laughing. 

The two of you shoot your way out. 

That night, you --

*

Can you explain what HYDRA did to you? You can recount in graphic, clear detail what happened after Zola put you on your knees in the canteen. You remember some of the faces of the men who did not survive the initial experiment.

You can describe, too, most of the subsequent work done on you: As the technicians attached leads or prepared the solutions, Zola would talk to you about it. If your German had not quite reached a level where you could understand what he was saying, or if fear had gripped you to the point where you forgot some of what you knew, he took pains to use smaller words. Simpler sentence structures. He wanted you to know, and you remember one time when he came to look at you his way out of the room to the observation booth. Round eyes, sweat on his forehead, a short man, and there was a stir on the table next to you. You were strapped down, so you couldn't lift your head up to see, but you could hear the panic.

"What did he say? What was he saying to you?"

American voice. American accent. 

Alternatively: cursing and shouts that you were a goddamn traitor because they recognized the pieces of uniform that you were still wearing.

Alternatively: silence, followed by screaming. 

You never finished high school and were not, while you were in high school, the most attentive or academic of students. You lie to the debriefers about how much you know of Zola's experiments; you lie to yourself. You lie to -- everyone and everything and every dream you have every night, whether it's a nightmare where you're back on the canteen floor and terrified, where you're back on the canteen floor and not terrified and welcoming every moment of it, where you're back in Brooklyn, sitting on a fire escape with Steve and watching traffic underneath your feet, where you're lying on a rug on your stomach, listening to a Dodgers game on the radio with a naked sub tucked against your back, asleep, or --

* 

You can explain what HYDRA did to you, and you tell yourself that you know: before Zola put the serum in you, you were a top. You were what you looked like, which was a regular guy from Brooklyn who liked fun and a little token resistance and a pretty mouth. You can describe what HYDRA did to you, and you tell yourself it was the serum that changed you. You tell yourself, in fact, that you are different from what came before because Zola put you on a table and put strange liquid into your veins, and strange, desperate thoughts in your head. 

At night, you wake from a dream about going to see Howard Stark for a tune-up to your rifle, and finding, instead, a small man with a soft face and round glasses. 

"So you're a survivor, Bucky Barnes, he says, looking at you. "Are you teachable? Do you want to live?"

In the dream, you say to him, "I don't want to die, sir." 

When you wake, it takes you a few moments to remember your arms and legs. After you do, you swing your legs off the bed while Dugan snores and Morita sighs in his sleep, curled on his side, arm hanging off the bed. The barracks have bunk beds to save space; you still have the one near the door, bottom one, but you don't share with anyone because, you sense, it would be a little weird to sleep over the Captain's bottom. When you strip down, it's quickly, in the corner, with your back to everyone. Military life doesn't leave much room for flexibility, but there is a little more for the Commandos, and you get your jacket from the hook by the bed and go through the door, which you close again behind you. Barefoot, you step out into the night air. You lean your arm against the side of the building and listen to the sounds of the night, listen to the sounds of Dugan snoring through the door. 

Zola, you tell yourself. 

Zola, you tell yourself, was frightened at the end. You go over the memory: you called out. "Where are you going?"

Zola stared at you.

You tested the restraints. It startled him, reminded him that he was frightened, so he staggered backward, out of reach, and then he ran away.

A few minutes later, Steve Rogers rescued you. 

You lean against the side of the building and look towards the corner. Steve's light is out. Why would he be up? It's a quarter past three. It's quiet on base, and after listening for another few minutes and not hearing anything, not even one of the aerial patrols overhead, you stub your cigarette out on the front step, lean your arm against the building, unzip the front of your trousers, and try, unsuccessfully, for a long time, to jerk off. 

Zola --

*

One afternoon,Steve gives the rest of the Howling Commandos leave until the morning, but instead of going with them, you stay in the room. You ask Steve if he wants you to stay, and you say, _yes_. So you come by after dinner. So you're on your knees, naked on the floor, kneeling next to Steve. Steve puts a little of the base-made moonshine into his palm, cupping it, and holds it down to you. 

He pours some of it into your mouth, and you suck the rest off Steve's fingers. You feel Steve's eyes on you, and you can see them, too. When he pulls his fingers out of your mouth, you move your tongue so that his fingers run across it. You suck in your cheeks, pull at his fingers so that there is an audible pop when he pulls his fingers out of your mouth. 

The radio is playing; when you look up there are spots of red on Steve's cheeks, and you feel dizzy, but instead of touching you, Steve slides his chair back a few feet.

"Hands on the desk," he says to you, and suddenly, with just those words, just Steve's voice, you're harder than you've been in a long time.

Steve Rogers is trying, and because Steve Rogers is trying, he beats you with his belt.

*

Steve remembers, you know, all the things that the two of you have done for each other over the years: both of you remember the time that you got arrested for pulling a man off his mother and hitting the would-be rapist hard enough times that you got arrested. Both of you remember all the times you spent sleeping on his floor or couch, depending on what stage his finances had reached, when you got kicked out of your ma's or your girl's or -- half the neighborhood assumed that he was your bottom, the childhood friend that you went back to at the end of the day. What else explained the number of times that you pulled him out of fights, or the way you put your arm around his shoulder sometimes? 

You came home one night from the late shift at the garage, and you found Steve lying on his side on the couch, eyes squeezed shut. You dropped your coat on a chair in a hurry and got down on your knees and put your hand on his forehead, checked his pulse, took the cloth that he'd been trying to keep on his bruising right eye and that had fallen off onto the floor, rinsed it off and put it back on his eye. 

"I shouldn't let you go out alone," you said, half-joking. 

There was a long moment of silence, and then Steve swallowed, stiffly, as if it hurt to do so. "That isn't funny," he said. 

You ignored him and checked his throat, his hands, the back of his head -- no fingers broken, only one biggish lump on the back of the head. His left wrist was deeply bruised and possibly twisted; there was a long bruise across it, as if he'd been strung up by one arm. Anyone else, you'd assume a good time, a nice night, but you know Steve. No bruises around Steve's neck, and he managed to get him in one piece, so --

"What happened?"

"They were saying it wasn't any of our business what happened over there."

"Did they get your belt off?"

"No," he says, finally, after a long, long moment, and you settle back onto your heels next to the couch and look at him. You consider asking Steve if he has ever considered keeping his mouth shut, but you've tried before, so you don't. 

*

Steve is roughly a foot taller than he used to be and a hundred pounds heavier; he is wide in the shoulders and strong in the arms and legs. Only the face is the same: broader in the jaw and across the cheekbones, but the proportions are the similar. Familiar. You know that he pulls out some paperwork and has the radio on, but you also know he is listening. He is watching out of the corner of the eye. You run your fingertips over the length, and you close your eyes and roll your palm over the head of your dick. There are clear, distinct lines that hurt across your back and legs and ass from the belt, and you come all over your own stomach and part of Steve's desk. 

You count to ten, then make yourself get off the desk, wipe it up with your undershirt, and get dressed. Steve doesn't say a word to you, and you spend the rest of the night in the barracks, alone, lying on your stomach in your bunk with the lights off, listening to the Howling Commandos shift and snore and sleep around you. 

*

"Did they get your belt off?" you say to Steve.

"No," he says, finally, after a long, long moment, and you settle back onto your heels next to the couch and look at him. You consider asking Steve if he has ever considered keeping his mouth shut, but you've tried before, and it hasn't worked, so you don't. 

Instead, you say, "You ever think about wearing a fake collar?" 

Steve doesn't say anything for a moment, then opens his one good eye. He still, in fact, sounds angry.

"People would think it was yours," he says. 

The words come out in anger, but nevertheless, they sit between the two of you like a goddamn rock.

*

At the end of it, Steve decides that he's had enough of having you look at him with that expression on your face, so he pulls himself upright, then gets up on wobbly legs. He tries to cross the living room and get to his bedroom, but manages three steps before his knees give out for a moment. He almost goes to the floor, and you sigh, but move quickly. 

"Come on, kid," you say, and slide his right arm over your shoulder. You put one of your arms arm under his back, another under his knees, and you pause for just a second, but Steve doesn't say a goddamn word. Instead, he just hangs onto the collar of your shirt with his good wrist with fingers that would probably take a crowbar to move off; you can feel the little knuckles against the side of your neck and the way every pound of his body that isn't being supported by your arms is being supported by that grip. 

So you carry Steve Rogers to his bed, and he doesn't say a thing. You untie his shoes, unbutton his shirt the rest of the way, and pull it off his shoulders. There are some more bruises, roughly chest and shoulder height. You'd guess, if you were a person inclined to imagination, that he'd gotten them by being thrown around. Shoved over things. Did they get his belt off? You consider asking again, but figure he won't say. If it was that bad --

"You want help?" you ask. 

He shakes his head and takes a deep breath, and you look at the bruise on his eye, the swollen look of his mouth, the left wrist that he holds against his stomach. You think about reminding him that his mother didn't think it was cowardly to wear a fake; she had one for years, but you don't say anything, and Steve doesn't, either. 

So you turn the light out and close the door. So you make yourself an egg and a slice of bread on the stove, pour out some beans from a can, and then, you turn on the radio and have a beer. You sleep on the couch, and the next morning, Steve is sitting at the breakfast table, head down, eating breakfast with his right eye swollen and viciously purple. He won't look you in the eye, but he did make coffee and put bread for two into the toaster. You consider him carefully, then sit down across from him. 

Neither of you says a word to the other. 

*

As far as you know, Steve's inability to keep his mouth goddamn shut got him threatened and hit a lot, but never got into what -- into what you, and what most others, would have called _real trouble_. 

Years after you ask Steve, in his place of work, whether they got his belt off -- because he is your friend and he wants to give you what you tell him you need, he takes his belt off your arms. It was holding your elbows behind your back for almost half an hour, and your arms and shoulders are first numb. Then, slowly, agonizingly, inch by inch, muscle by muscle, they catch fire. 

Because you want him to, years later, Steve beats you with his belt. 

*

In a forest in the Austrian Alps, you dream that your hands are tied behind your back and a strong hand is holding your head down into a bucket of water. 

The terrifying part comes after that: when they pull your head out of the water, you are eager to please.

*

Still: 

Jones shakes you out of it, and you were dreaming about your hands being tied behind your back because you fell asleep on your left arm. You were dreaming about being held down in water because it's started raining. You're cold and stiff in every bone while you unwrap yourself and your sniper rifle from the oilcloth you'd been sleeping under. It's raining; it's cold. The air smells like pine trees. It might be summer down below, but this far up in the mountains, winter lasts. 

Jones grins while you try to get your frozen fingers moving. 

In the afternoon, you singlehandedly break an attempt by HYDRA to charge and overrun a position that Dernier and Cap are defending. 

*

It's cold and wet when you run a hundred yards towards enemy fire to half-carry, half-drag Dugan to safety. It's cold and wet when you're perched on top of a cliff while the Commandos comb through a burned-out site. It's cold and wet when you and put a bullet through the eye socket of a HYDRA agent who would otherwise have shot Steve. 

*

Here is what Zola did to you: tortured you, administered experimental serum, then tortured you again to see whether the serum made a difference in your ability to survive torture. When you survived, he wanted to see what other effects the serum had. Did it make you more trainable? Did it make you more skilled? He found that it did both. Consequently, you survived to remember kneeling by his chair while he scratched away in his notebook. 

You survive to kneel in the corner while Steve works on field reports. 

If he knew the connection, would he still let you do it? 

*

Steve used to get the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis. You know he got knocked around; he insisted it wasn't about sex for him, that it wasn't his way of going out and getting laid, _Listen, I have no problem if that's what you want_ , you'd say. _Sex isn't the only thing submissives think about_ , he'd say, scowling while you held a cool cloth to his lower lip. 

Years later, you save Steve's life, and it's now remarkable enough that you'd be able to save Steve's life. Consequently -- 

*

You save Steve's life, and he has a sense of what you want, even if he may not understand why.

The next time the Commandos have liberty and a pass off base, you come to him. He makes you kneel with a glass bottle in your mouth, and he pulls your elbows behind your back with his belt. When your jaw is exhausted and spasming, when your shoulders are trembling and your thighs ache with the effort of keeping your balance, you drop the bottle. It breaks. He has you stay still in the middle of the shards, thighs trembling, arms and shoulders burning, and when he is ready, he bends you over his desk and beats you with his belt while sensation rushes back into your arms and shoulders. In the moment, it hurts almost more than being struck with his leather. 

Your head swims. Your breath comes fast, and for a while, all your fear and doubt disappear. There is a small amount of blood; Steve will have to wipe his belt down. 

There is a lot of sunlight. 

*

Steve tries not to put welts on top of welts, but didn't have much room towards the end, and afterwards, you lean forward. You open your mouth. You bring it -- 

It isn't a big room.

"No." Steve pushes your head back. 

"You're hard," you tell him. 

So are you. 

*

You are short of breath. Pain fills your world, and that is probably blood running down your thighs from where the belt broke your skin: there is little of it, compared to other situations you have been in, but the skin on your thighs is thin, and Steve's belt is heavy. 

Instead of letting you suck him off, instead of putting you down on your knees among the glass or bending you over the bed and telling you to grip hard -- instead of doing any of those things, Steve tells you to put your clothes on. He tells you to get out. 

It has relatively little to do, you know, with him loving Peggy Carter. 

*

You have dreams of being half-drowned and still being desperate to please; you have memories of kneeling for Zola the way that you knelt that afternoon for Steve, the way that you would again and again. You also have distinct, actual memories of being bloody and still wanting to taste Steve inside your mouth. One night, after he belts you over his desk and you offer to get him off, so he tells you to get out -- one night, the Commandos have a weekend pass to go to London, and you surprise them by going with them. They go out drinking at a pub, and earlier than might be expected, they leave. Everyone is standing outside; it's a cloudy night with a crescent of a moon, so few bombers are expected. 

"Uh," Dugan says, looking embarrassed. 

You look at him, steady, and he looks away eventually. Eventually, Morita hits him on the shoulder. 

*

After everyone has taken their pick, you are still sitting in the main room, nursing your drink. The house madame comes over: she has no interest in letting you sit in her front room and free-load, even if all your friends have gone off with a sub apiece. Falsworth took two, saying that he might not live to spend it, so why not? A girl switch and a boy sub together, and before the madame can open her mouth, you reach into your pocket and take out -- 

Well, it's a collar. 

She blinks at it. 

Then: 

"Extra if you want to put it on one of my subs," she says, adjusting rapidly to calculate how much money she can get out of you and how many days out of commission her toughest, hardest sub is going to be. Or are you the kind that wants to cuddle and pretend at being domestic with the girl you left behind? The boy you will never have? 

_The boy you will never have._ You shake your head to clear it: the liquor didn't do a thing, but lust is making you dizzy. 

"It's for me," you say. 

Hat on, fingers over leather, you tilt your head back to look her in the eye. 

Part of you is gratified. Is the same part of you ashamed?

*

The Commandos know things have hit a rough patch with Steve: you come into town with them on leave. You're back to sleeping in your bunk by the door. He goes for long walks with Agent Carter in the woods and on the lawn. They laugh and smile together. She takes his arm and leans against his shoulder. 

One afternoon, while Steve and Agent Carter are out walking together, Dugan comes back to quarters and sees you sitting on your bunk, fingering a strip of black leather with a silver pendant in front: a wing, in silver, three feathers. 

"Fucking hell, Barnes," he says. "I'm sorry. I didn't know." 

He assumes, after all, that the collar is from the old days of Brooklyn, that you've been wearing it at some other part on your body or keeping it tucked away because Steve doesn't want to rub it in that he has his sub with him when everyone else is doing without. Now something has gone wrong: now, Steve is sending you into town with the rest of the Commandos and doesn't care if you get fucked by someone he never meets. He is openly courting Peggy Carter, walking around hand-in-hand with her. Who thinks they don't belong together? Everyone sees how well they work together.

On the other hand -- 

*

Two days later, when you're in some pine trees along a ridge and there is a loaded rifle in your hands, you think about shooting people's brains out in the following order:

Dugan. 

Steve.

Yourself. 

*

Do you resent Agent Peggy Carter? No. 

*

Where did you get the collar? You walked into a jewelry store and put down American dollars and a line about how you wanted to surprise your man. 

*

One afternoon, you think about summer a decade before. Steve's mother was dead, and your dad was around. You meet Steve at the delivery entrance of Mr. and Mrs. K: he comes down the steps, dinner in a flour sack. He opens the bag and shows you a thick slice of Greek homemade cheese, wrapped in a napkin. A thick slice of bread. Two peaches. You show Steve that you have two dimes in your pocket, and it's enough for the two of you to take the subway down to Coney Island, where the heat of summer is a little lighter. Steve will never admit it, but it's easier to breathe when the evening breeze is blowing clean, cooler air from the ocean. 

The two of you sit on the boardwalk, split the bread and cheese and peaches, then rinse your hands in a public fountain and walk up and down the main strip, watching people. 

Then, the two of go into one of the of the drugstores, order a soda each, and make it last. 

Steve had been sleeping in the back room of a grocery store, and concentrates on his soda while you flirts with a girl and her friend who were also out. Frances and -- you don't remember the other girl's name, but you remember that she worked in a department store, selling gloves. You noticed the other girl looking at you, studying you from under eyes, so you slid one stool over and smiled at her and friend in equal measure, because you made them both for subs. 

Steve kept his eyes on the opposite wall, but he was listening while he made his soda _last_. 

Later, when the drugstore closed, when the night was as cool as it was going to get, you and Steve lay down in the sand underneath the boardwalk. 

*

Have you ever told anyone, specifically, that it was Zola who experimented on you? That you see Zola's face in nightmares that come when you are awake?

Two pencil-pushers from Research and Strat are showing slides. The other lights have been turned off, but with your eyes, you can make out everything you need to see: you look away from Steve, who is paying attention and frowning slightly. His hair gleams. Instead, you look at Carter, who sitting next to him. Her lips are thin. Her head is tilted back, and her eyes are narrow. She doesn't like the idea of bringing Zola in as a friendly scientific resource. She doesn't trust him. From time to time, her expression tightens even more and she taps the folder of documents in front of her, sharply, and makes herself pay attention to the presentation again. 

When the lights come back on, and the Research and Start guys ask for questions, she presses her lips together so tightly that you know they are pale under her lipstick. Peggy Carter is a good soldier, and she knows when operational priorities have been decided. 

*

Later, wet snow is falling, but you look out the barracks window, and there _Steve and Peggy_ are. Her hand is on his arm. They are talking, quietly, seriously, walking along a little narrow strip of concrete that hasn't been covered by the snow yet because it retains heat. They are talking about Zola, you'd guess. _Agent Carter_ objects to it more strongly than Steve does. Steve sees practical benefits. 

They are both in heavy coats; there is snow on Steve's shoulders. There is snow on her hat. You have never clearly told Steve what Zola did, or how Zola tested your obedience: you have a feeling that if you had told Steve, in the beginning, or even now, Steve might change his mind about taking the Howling Commandos after Zola. 

_Not at that price,_ you can hear him saying to Colonel Phillips. 

You turn away from the window and go back to cleaning your rifle. 

*

The Howling Commandos go on a mission, and you find a sheaf of papers that lets Allied cryptographers crack HYDRA encrypted transmissions. Steve brings the compass with Agent Carter's picture at the top; when they get back to base, Steve's door is half-open. The rest of the Commandos are on an overnight pass, and you are alone in the dormitories. You strip of our pants. You strip off your underwear. You are quite sure that you are alone, and you get out the tin of Vaseline. You turn on your side, take a fair amount of Vaseline on your fingers, wipe it off on your bare hip, so that you won't have to go back to the tin. 

You start with one finger inside you. 

It's cold. Uncomfortable. With your eyes closed, you think, for a sudden moment, about waking underneath the boardwalk at Coney Island. You turned to your side, cold and stiff from lying in sand, but then sat up. You looked at the ocean under the pre-dawn light; you saw the fine edge of Steve's face, turned into the sleeve of his shirt. 

* 

Afterwards, you pull your trousers back on, but not your underwear. You go to Steve, and for the first time, the last time, two of you have sex. It happens the way he prefers, slow, careful. With kissing. Without pain. 

Snow is on the ground. Zola is on the train below. 

*

One night, you dream about being back in Mrs. Rogers's kitchen. Your shirt sticks to your back; the stairs are steep. Afternoon light comes in through a window, and an apple and sandwich have been laid out on the table. They are not yet cut in half, but you can smell coffee on the stove. 

When you look up, though, you don't see Mrs. Rogers or even her son, small as you knew him, or large as he is now. 

Instead, Zola, although his face is blurry. Over the course of those months, how many times did you see his face without tears or blood or sweat or something else in your eyes? How often did you have the courage to look him in the face? Still, you know those shoulders. You know those hand, lying on the edge of the table. You feel him looking at you, and your chest suddenly hurts. He pushes the chair back a fraction of an inch, and you know the next thing that will happen is that without him saying a word, without you having the courage to look him in the face, you are going to take your clothes off and get off the table and slide down so that your legs hang off the side, and without being asked, you will pick up the knife lying next to the apple and the sandwich and give him the knife, and he is going to stand up all the way and get the large knife from the drawer and you know, you know, in the bottom of your bones, in the coldest part of your soul, that this is what you deserve. 

In a dream within a dream, you can hear the drawer opening. You can hear the knife sliding out; you can hear Zola humming quietly to himself before turning back to you, stretched over the table. 

Despite the light coming in through Sarah Rogers's window and touching the walls, the floor, the cabinets, Zola is in shadow. So are you. 

*

In the end, you go to Steve. The room is washed in gold. Are you?

*

In the end, on the train, James Barnes, you try, but you cannot. 

After what has happened to you, what can you expect? In the end, what do you deserve? You see a glimpse of Sarah Rogers, unblurred by Zola; you remember sand on your lips when you looked at Sarah's son in the half-light before dawn underneath the boardwalk. You think of Peggy and Steve with their heads together in the snow: you bend down while Steve is down. You take the shield on your arm, and advance, firing. 

The force of the energy blast separates you from the shield. It goes one way. You go the other. 

After that -- what? After taking care of the HYDRA agent, Steve comes over to the edge of the railcar. He thrusts his hand out at you. You look at it. You look his face. In the cold and the wind, your eyes are watering. Steve shouts again and edges closer, trying to get far enough over to reach you. 

Against everything you expected, you want to grab his hand. You want to live. 

But conditions are challenging. It is cold. It is wet. The train is moving at a high speed, and there are vibrations. The wind is strong. Consequently, you lose your grip. Your fingers come off. You don't want them to. But one moment there -- the next moment, you are screaming as you fall. 

Your body has betrayed you before. Your will has proved inadequate before. 

* 

You fall for a long time. Pain? Fear? You are terrified while you fall. Until the cold of the snow and ice and mountain take you under, you are in excruciating pain. At the same time, what is that compared to how you have lived in the time since you came off Zola's table? Never mind what came before, on the table. A normal man would have died on impact; a normal man would have died of exposure. Thanks to Zola and his work, you are not a normal man. You have not been for some time. 

Whatever you are now, whatever you become in the decades that follow -- at least you left the collar with Steve's mark on the ledge next to the zipline. You are not found with it, years later, by a secret Soviet retrieval team that heard of secret HYDRA treasure being thrown overboard to prevent it from falling into the hands of the famous Captain America and his Howling Commandos. They have improved mind-control technology. They are able to clear away your memories, and believe, moreover, that your operational efficiency and compliance are increased by regular wipes. The world that comes in the decades after is a different one. The work you do is challenging. Difficult. Suited for your remarkable and singular skill set. 

In the end, compared to all the decades you are the Winter Soldier, how long are you actually James Buchanan Barnes? 

In the end, it only takes a moment for the ice to close over everything.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has basically sat around in my gdocs with everything written for more than six months except for that tiny bit about Zola and Bucky in the Rogers kitchen. I've been done with the MCU in general and Steve/Bucky in particular for a long, long time, and I probably would have never have gotten finished if it hadn't been for the fact that ages ago, I swore a public vow to [finish it](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/115713443546/fun-fact-i-wrote-that-fandom-is-the-best-post) for [stoatsandwich](http://stoatsandwich.tumblr.com/), who had read it as a WIP and had given me absolutely lovely feedback on it. But I was stuck like something fierce. And then months after the fact, [a reblog of a post I made about it](http://easytitletotype.tumblr.com/post/143186264390/fun-fact-i-wrote-that-fandom-is-the-best-post) showed up in my tumblr activity. A Rhod Chang always repays her promises. Or something.
> 
> Thanks, also, to [marmolita](http://marmolita.tumblr.com/) for reading this back in the day, and for encouraging me to finish the first one. REMEMBER THOSE FICS FROM BACK IN THE DAY WHEN ONE CHAPTER OR WHATEVER WOULD BE FROM HARRY'S PERSPECTIVE AND THE OTHER FROM B'ELANNA'S? :D :D :D :D
> 
> I can't remember, but parts of this are almost certainly [destro's](http://destronomics.tumblr.com/) . We'll work on the assumption that if a line or idea was punchy or horrible or made you gasp, it was theirs. :D


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